Letters: How government obstruction affects schools

regard to education Gov. Jerry Brown nominally released education spending to the local school board level [“Brown’s subsidiarity and its civic discontents,” Oct. 17]. In everything else, Brown and the decades hold of power by Democrats and liberal legislators in Sacramento, continue to control the majority of local education decisions.

These elected persons without opposition in policy making, mandate unpopular unvalidated and unfunded programs like Common Core. Brown, and others, also force upon local school boards unfunded mandates such as Assembly Bill 1266 (The bathroom transgender bill). An end result of these efforts is limited choice of curriculums, endless assessments and too many unfunded and mandated political and social engineering programs.

State control is generally a good public policy position. Brown’s governing philosophy, however, results in individual school boards lacking “local control” and marginalization of parents and school boards members.

Worse yet, I have not even addressed the federal mandates and control in local education. The federal government mandates without funds everything from special education, free and reduced price lunch, Title 1, Title 2, Title 3 and No Child Left Behind just to name a few programs. The IDEA figure alone results in $396 million dollars taken out from school budgets each year to O.C. schools alone.

Favors for Hollywood

IRVINE, Don Bradshaw: The editorial “Hooray for Hollywood tax incentives” [“Oct. 17] gets it right describing hellish California tax rates and policies but doesn’t explore why those policies exist. Unjustified faith in government’s ability to always accomplish good is part of it.

Control over economic winners or losers is also important to our central planners. First siphon off wealth and then direct it to favored causes and constituencies. Given that, Hollywood is the perfect recipient industry. However it is better to recognize that the movie industry is voting with its feet like so many other industries. Throwing tax favors to large donors doesn’t address root causes.

Possible increased tax revenue from Hollywood tax breaks might even exceed the immediate costs but it perpetuates bad governance and broader economic stagnation. There is a reason California ranks almost last in business climate.

Obamacare: the numbers

TRABUCO CANYON, Mark Morse: According to the Office of Budget and Management, the Affordable Care Act will give about 30 million people health insurance who presently don’t have it. And as liberals will tell you, it is the right and moral thing to do. OK, fine.

Lets look at the numbers. I’ve read quite a few articles on the cost of the signup website that has been a dismal failure. The website’s contractor, CGI Federal, said it bid $94 million and won the contract. And if you believe there were no cost over runs, I have a bridge to sell you.

But let's go with the low number of $94 million. Instead of spending that money on a failed website (given to a Canadian contractor that farmed out the coding to India), why not just give the money to 30 million uninsured? That's 3-plus million for each of the 30 million. At say, $20,000 a year to pay for their health insurance, that's enough money to pay each one of those 30 million, their health insurance premiums and deductibles for more than 150 years.

We can go a step further and take the missing $67 million that the IRS admittedly has no idea where it went. Out of the $1 billion the IRS has gotten from the Obamacare slush fund, and the government could insure another 20 million for another 150 years. That's 50 million people insured for life. That solves their problem for years to come for less than $200 million.

Remember, the government has already spent hundreds of millions more and the law hasn’t even taken full effect yet. Of course that would mean one sixth of the economy would not be controlled by the government and a huge, ravenous new bureaucracy wouldn't be created. And I suspect the government would not be able to have $200 million fund sitting in that fund for years without stealing all the money at some point in time and leaving IOUs in its place. So one has to wonder what the real motivation was for creating the ACA.

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